One tech tool coming from the social media world was able to instantly connect people all over the world that their friends and loved ones in the area were safe. Facebook Safety Check, a system for geolocating Facebook users and asking them to “check in” as safe, was originally developed to respond to natural disasters like the April 2015 Nepal earthquake. However, it was activated in response to the Paris attacks, the first time that the feature was activated for an attack and not a weather event, suggesting wider applications for the service. Safety Check can even work without an Internet connection as Facebook users in an affected area can confirm their status via text message.

It’s not good enough to leave the conversation at how well consumer tech enables innocent victims to respond in the face of evil. Rather, the question which is it our job to focus on here is how well can technology prevent evil from happening in light of the scant details about the attack which are currently available. Where do we need to innovate and become smarter and more technologically savvy in order to eradicate ISIL like the pestilence that it is?

The National Security Agency had been working to beef up its ability to effectively monitor those suspected of having terrorist ties and walking within the borders of the United States. Thanks to the Edward Snowden leaks, we know that the organization at least had been actively building a picture database using millions of pictures culled from e-mail, social media and video conferences. Although civil liberties and data privacy questions have abounded from this, it has been noted in at least the report linked above that, thanks to federal privacy laws, the images collected would most likely be of foreign citizens.

Now may be the perfect time to have the discussion on whether additional government surveillance of data may have its place in a time when it’s clear that communications technologies have been used to plot and carry out attacks. Recently, the European Court of Justice, the highest court in the EU, declared invalid the U.S.-EU agreement regarding safe harbor for the data practices of American businesses. A privacy activist was able to successfully argue that, in light of new information on NSA’s data mining practices, that American businesses could no longer self-certify that their data would be kept private from government agencies. In light of the Paris attacks, this is a crucial three-month period during which our Congress must develop new safe harbor rules with which the European Union can agree. It’s not unreasonable to suggest that those new safe harbor rules could go too far in the direction of protecting individual privacy at the risk of allowing that which we shouldn’t allow. Europe is also the land of the right to be forgotten, which is the principle that private citizens should be able to petition search engines like Google to have unwanted personal information taken off of the Internet. Although a request to hide information related to jihadi activities would seem to serve as a sufficient red flag, it’s also true that there are some things that shouldn’t be forgotten, for the greater good.

Innovation is a tough thing to predict but it helps to look at how technology development has responded to past tragedies similar to this. The September 11th terror attacks inspired a wide array of innovations that could stop a similar attack, from the remote control of hijacked airplanes to video bio-monitoring systems which could be able to accurately detect when someone is lying. There’s no doubt that the blood running through the streets of Paris late Friday night will go a long way in encouraging the next innovations in terrorist recognition and elimination technologies.

The Author

Steve Brachmann
is a writer located in Buffalo, New York. He has worked professionally as a freelancer for more than a decade. He has become a regular contributor to IPWatchdog.com, writing about technology, innovation and is the primary author of the Companies We Follow series. His work has been published by The Buffalo News, The Hamburg Sun, USAToday.com, Chron.com, Motley Fool and OpenLettersMonthly.com. Steve also provides website copy and documents for various business clients.

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